Pakistan — An untapped market for IT and Software Development with lot of potential

Pakistan being the sixth largest populated country, with advantageous geographical location, a large talent pool is well equipped to play an essential role in the future global economy. Pakistan holds immense potential for foreign investors (especially sister cities) who are looking for new growth avenues in software development and infrastructure including sustained profit growth of 20–40% annually.

Pakistan has been producing quality IT engineers. The proof is the number of Pakistani graduates working in top 5 Software companies i.e. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook.

Pakistan has a lot of potential for IT development but is yet unexplored. No one had taken serious steps towards the development of IT market.

History of Pakistan’s IT field:

With the advancement of time things are getting better. IT industry of Pakistan is growing at a fast pace across different categories. The foundation of IT was laid by Federal Minister of Technology Atta-ur-Rehman in 2000. Then for its growth a 15 years holiday with no tax on IT was approved. Then started the training of 220,000 teachers by Intel in 2002. Resultantly the IT market grew from $30 million to $3 billion. The export of IT was increased to 50% from 2003–2005. In 2014 Global Information Technology Report Pakistan was ranked 111th out of 144 countries for accessment of IT.

Mere negligence in IT:

There has been seen a constant negligence of the government for last few years due to which no development occurred in IT. The R&D institutions did not perform well due to lack of funds. Our IT universities were marked as low standard due to deteriorated environment and facilities.

Start-ups:

People are more inclined towards start-ups now. A lot of youngsters want to be entrepreneurs. This is quite evident by a figure that export of IT was $3.3 billion in 2016–2017 which jumped to $5 billion in 2018 and will cross $6billion this year. The growth is evident in following categories

• Enterprise software 17%.
• Marketing Tech 15%.
• Financial Services 13%.
• Consumer goods 9%.
• E-commerce 8%.
• Professional services 8%.
• Internet of things 7%.